Fantasy Fans Flock to Fantasy Football

Hi, my name is Chris Bulger and I’m a fantasy football addict. Here is my typical fantasy football week: • On Tuesday and Wednesday, I visit fantasy football sites to research players on waivers and find the best players to help my team win. • On Thursday morning I check out my rosters to see which players I was able to claim off of waivers. • On Sunday morning I

Hi, my name is Chris Bulger and I’m a fantasy football addict. Here is my typical fantasy football week:

• On Tuesday and Wednesday, I visit fantasy football sites to research players on waivers and find the best players to help my team win.
• On Thursday morning I check out my rosters to see which players I was able to claim off of waivers.
• On Sunday morning I research matchups and set my lineups accordingly. By noon on Sunday (before the games have even started), I have visited my fantasy football site upwards of 10 times throughout the week.

While some might consider this many visits excessive, it only gets crazier once kickoff occurs. Throughout the course of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday morning, I’m constantly checking out my team to get an update on the fantasy matchup score and see if I can claim victory (and bragging rights) for the week.

So today, I’m turning to the Compete data to get an answer: Is visiting these sites 25+ times per week excessive? Am I alone or do others share in this behavior? I think I know the answer, but I want to be sure.

The chart below illustrates Daily Reach, or, how many people visited a site or sites in the Fantasy Sports category as a percentage of all U.S. Internet users. Daily Reach during the months football is being played, especially on Sundays, is higher than during the rest of the year – no surprise there. Daily Reach for the Fantasy Sports category during the months when football is being played averages 2.17%, compared to 1.13% during the months when football isn’t being played.

What sites are driving all of this attention to the Fantasy Sports category? The top 10 sites in the Fantasy Sports category are in the table below. Yahoo! (fantasysports.yahoo.com) comes in at 6.1M UVs (monthly Unique Visotors), and ESPN ( games.espn.go.com) attracts 5.5M UVs. These sites offer an array of Fantasy Sports options, not only Football, and do a great job attracting the attention of Fantasy Sports enthusiasts. Fantasy.nfl.com, which only offers NFL fantasy football, attracted 2.7M Unique Visitors in September 2010. Even cbssports.com, which breaks its Fantasy Sports options into different subdomains, attracts more fantasy football fans than fantasy baseball fans. Football.cbssports.com attracted 1.9M UVs in September 2010, compared to baseball.cbssports.com which had 350k UVs.

Top 10 Fantasy Sports Sites: September 2010

Rank

Site

Unique Visitors

Monthly Change

Yearly Change

1

fantasysports.yahoo.com

6,115,530

47.77%

-14.22%

2

games.espn.go.com

5,461,712

48.91%

-0.64%

3

fantasy.nfl.com

2,709,801

60.83%

No Data

4

football.cbssports.com

1,940,999

68.89%

-26.14%

5

fantasynews.cbssports.com

896,204

25.71%

-12.83%

6

rotoworld.com

651,002

16.41%

-1.17%

7

streak.espn.go.com

588,362

15.46%

-24.93%

8

fftoolbox.com

567,552

-10.88%

17.63%

9

fantasy.foxsports.com

389,254

31.57%

-17.56%

10

baseball.cbssports.com

347,416

-11.74%

-36.01%

How about you, are you a fantasy football addict? If so, don’t worry…according to the data you’re not the only one.

Fantasy football is here to stay and increasing in participants each day, week, month and year! With the innovation of weekly fantasy sports, we can rest assured that the best of fantasy football is yet to come.